... Liberals roll their eyes at the claim that President Obama violated democratic norms or abused his power. But putting aside the specific arguments, conservatives saw plenty of abuses and violations, from the IRS scandals and Benghazi to the Iran deal. Obama said many times he couldn’t unilaterally implement the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program because he wasn’t a “king.” Then he did it anyway. And the process repeats itself, getting worse and more egregious each time. When I criticize Trump, the first response from countless Republicans is, “Oh yeah, why was it okay for Obama!?” If I point...

There's a great scene in the wonderful 1982 movie "My Favorite Year," which is set in 1954. Peter O'Toole plays a semi-washed-up actor named Alan Swann, famous for swashbuckling roles. For reasons too complicated to explain here, Swann tries to shimmy down the side of a building using a fire hose. He ends up dangling just below a cocktail party on a balcony. Two stockbrokers are chatting when one of them notices Swann swinging below them. "I think Alan Swann is beneath us!" he exclaims. The second stockbroker replies: "Of course he's beneath us. He's an actor." It may be...

There are plenty of shocking bombshells in Michael Wolff's new book, "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House," but is there anything actually new? I haven't read it yet, but I have been following the crowdsourced effort by other journalists to recount every salacious tidbit. The quotes from staffers and Cabinet secretaries are indeed shocking by the standards of your typical "inside account" of an administration's first year. I don't recall so many White House luminaries competing to out-insult the commander in chief before. "For [Treasury Secretary] Steve Mnuchin and [then-Chief of Staff] Reince Priebus, he was an 'idiot,'"...

Ever since Donald Trump touched the Orb, praise be upon it, I've been making "This is what you get when you touch the Orb" jokes. If you don't know what I'm talking about, I'll tell you: On his trip to the Middle East in May, President Trump, along with the Saudi king and the president of Egypt, laid his hands on a glowing white orb for two minutes (which strikes me as a long time to touch an orb). The image was like a mix of J.R.R. Tolkien and 1970s low-budget Canadian sci-fi. It looked like they were calling forth...

I feel for Jonah Goldberg and the rest of the #NeverTrumpers at Conservatism Inc. The awful truth is that their Resistance to the leftward ratchet has failed, and the world has moved on. So last week Jonah’s G-File is “Against One-Thingism,” complaining that we are becoming like our lefty friends for whom politics is everything, what with Republican and Trump support for Roy Moore, candidate for United States Senator in Alabama and all. Okay, Jonah, so what is Baldrick’s cunning plan for dishing the left? Let’s do the Eisenhower thing and make the problem bigger. What do you do when...

I'll cut to the chase: I think Roy Moore did it. And I can predict what Moore supporters will say: "Of course you would believe that!" After all, I called for conservatives to repudiate Moore, the Alabama Republican candidate for the Senate seat vacated by Jeff Sessions, before the Washington Post's meticulously reported story alleging that Moore dated teenagers and, in one instance, molested a 14 year-old-girl. So naturally, I would exploit this politically timed "smear" to ruin a "good man." That's the nature of the Moore defense I'm hearing, not just from folks on Twitter and via email, but...

One of my favorite kinds of news stories is the report of a new scientific study that verifies the obvious. You've seen them. New research finds that heterosexual men are attracted to very attractive women. Evidence collected by wildlife researchers has confirmed that bears really do use the woods as toilets. But some research that corroborates the obvious is exciting because some people refuse to accept the obvious. Which brings me to the work of Dr. Gregory Berns, a neuroscientist at Emory University and the author of "What It's Like to Be a Dog." Berns has, from what I can...

Fighting Nazis is a good thing, but fighting Nazis doesn’t necessarily make you or your cause good. By my lights this is simply an obvious fact. The greatest Nazi-killer of the 20th century was Josef Stalin. He also killed millions of his own people and terrorized, oppressed, enslaved or brutalized tens of millions more. Nazism was evil. Soviet Communism was evil. It’s fine to believe that Nazism was more evil than Communism. That doesn’t make Communism good. Yet confusion on this point poisoned politics in America and abroad for generations. Part of the problem is psychological. There’s a natural tendency...

Let me just say this at the outset: Mildred Dresselhaus, who died in February at the age of 86, was an amazing woman. An accomplished physicist who won just about every scientific award short of the Nobel Prize, Dresselhaus was by all accounts a pioneer, patriot and great American. Nonetheless, I still find GE's commercial in her honor to be profoundly creepy. If you haven't seen the ad, which debuted at the Oscars and is omnipresent on MSNBC, you can find it on YouTube. It opens with a little girl unwrapping her birthday present. "A Millie Dresselhaus doll!" she exclaims...

Demosthenes, the Athenian rhetorician and champion of liberty, pointed out around 355 B.C. that residents of Athens were free to praise Sparta's regime, but Spartans were banned from praising Athens. In 1689, the British passed a law guaranteeing freedom of speech in Parliament. A century later, French revolutionaries incorporated into law the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which established free speech as a universal right. Two years later, the Americans ratified the First Amendment, which guarantees that the state shall not infringe on the right to free speech. Roughly a century and half later, in 1948, the United Nations...

I've heard many versions of this story, but I’ll go with the one reportedly told by Dr. Abraham Twerski, a renowned psychiatrist and Orthodox rabbi. (I’ve trimmed and paraphrased it a bit.) The bearded Twerski goes to the airport in his Hasidic garb — the hat, the long coat, the buttoned white shirt. Another Jew, this one modernly dressed, is annoyed by Twerski and unloads on him: “What’s wrong with you? Must you insist on parading around in that medieval get-up as if it were Purim? Don’t you realize how ridiculous you look? You bring nothing but scorn and embarrassment...

Dear Reader (including the good cat, which for some reason is opposed to my daughter getting an education), I should just say it clearly: I will never fall in love with Donald Trump. For most of you, this is not a big surprise. But for some, it’s a kind of betrayal. In much the same way the Left gets furious when you just don’t care enough about its priorities, many of Trump’s biggest supporters get bizarrely angry at the fact that I am not emotionally correct when it comes to the new president. Monsieur Google tells me that “emotional correctness”...

Barack Obama formally ended his presidency the way he came in, talking to adoring fans about how lucky we are to have him in our lives. Indeed, given the hand-wringing over how Obama's successor is all about entertainment and theatrics, it was somewhere between ironic and absurd to watch the outgoing president hold a campaign rally for his "farewell address." And yet, we've become so inured to this kind of self-serving pomp and circumstance that no one seems to care. From what I can tell, no liberal commentators minded at all, and most conservative reviewers went straight to the substance...

Of all Barack Obama’s costumes, the most ill-fitting is that of the hawk. The guise doesn’t work for all sorts of ideological and historical reasons. Plus there’s the fact that he’s rushing to put on the outfit as he’s heading out the door. The new sanctions against Russia are fine with me on the merits, even if they are remarkably tardy and being sold in no small part for domestic, political reasons. Russian President Vladimir Putin has been undermining American interests for a long time now. From the annexation of Crimea and a shadow war in Ukraine to his unabashed...

Of all Barack Obama's costumes, the most ill-fitting is that of the hawk. The guise doesn't work for all sorts of ideological and historical reasons. Plus there's the fact that he's rushing to put on the outfit as he's heading out the door. The new sanctions against Russia are fine with me on the merits, even if they are remarkably tardy and being sold in no small part for domestic, political reasons. Russian President Vladimir Putin has been undermining American interests for a long time now. From the annexation of Crimea and a shadow war in Ukraine to his unabashed...

Fidel Castro died as he lived: to the sound of useful idiots making allowances for his crimes. (That's not my term: It was Lenin who called liberal apologists for Communism "useful idiots.") The gold medal in the Useful Idiot Olympics should probably go to Justin Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada. In a statement, he expressed his "deep sorrow" upon learning that "Cuba's longest serving president" had died. One can only imagine what George Orwell could do with that one word, "serving." Castro did not serve; he ruled a nation of servants, often cruelly, while making obscene profits for himself...

"The Oval Office, I always thought I was going to have really cool phones and stuff. . . I'm like, 'C'mon guys, I'm the president of the United States. Where's the fancy buttons and stuff and the big screen comes up?' It doesn't happen." -- President Obama The list of people I feel sorry for is long. It includes not just all of the people I know personally who are suffering from one misfortune or another, but the billions around the world who're having a rougher time than they ought: Japanese earthquake victims, targets of ethnic cleansing, etc. Then there's...

Do you know the old wheelbarrow joke? It's truly funny only to grandpas and the grandkids they tell it to, so I won't bother with the elaborate setup. For years a factory worker pushes a wheelbarrow full of straw past a security guard on his way out. Suspicious that the guy is stealing something, the guard looks in the straw but can't find anything. Finally, when the worker is retiring, the guard asks, "I know you've been stealing something -- can you tell me what it is? The guy smiles and says, "Wheelbarrows." That joke keeps popping into my head...

Media Have a ‘Cry Wolf’ Problem with Trump Decades of smearing decent Republican candidates leaves them without credibility on Trump’s demagoguery. By Jonah Goldberg — July 27, 2016 Dear Mainstream Media and Democrats: It’s your turn. Now that Donald Trump has been formally nominated, the formal responsibility to stop him passes from the Right to the Left, from Republicans to Democrats and the journalists who amplify their values. You’re going to find it a very tough slog. And it’s your own damn fault. During the primaries, the task of exposing the true nature of the Trump takeover fell disproportionately to...